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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Here are some good sources for students who want to learn about U.S. Presidents.

(Of course students can use Wikipedia, which often has good articles. Why not stop there? (1) Some Wikipedia articles are written in a style that is hard for some students to read. (2) Some teachers don't want students to cite Wikipedia. (3) Wikipedia articles are unsigned. (4) Wikipedia articles don't give you access to all the great documents and images available in some of the sites listed here.)

Whitehouse.gov is the official site for the current administration. It has short biographies of the presidents here.

The site lists its source:

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The
Presidents of the United States of America,” by Michael Beschloss and
Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2009 by the White House Historical Association.

In addition to the timeline, there are "exhibits" on special topics for most of the presidents—for example, President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb (1945) and the desegregation of the armed forces (1948-1954).

Many of the Presidential Libraries' websites have special pages for students. For instance, the Kennedy Library has For Students, the Johnson Library has LBJ for Kids!, and the Eisenhower Library has Student Resources. You can often find these pages under Education.

Some of the "kids" pages will be useful for younger students. Some are written at a high school level.

The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara pulls together thousands of documents into one searchable database. You can find speeches, papers, party platforms, and more.

Do you like data? This site also gives you data comparing presidents on number of major speeches made, approval ratings, budget information, and more.

If you want to go directly to the audio and video materials, click on media.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

An anagram is a word or phrase that's formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. For example, the letters that make up "A decimal point" can be turned into the anagram "I’m a dot in place."

People mainly make anagrams just for fun, but sometimes they’re used as pseudonyms or codes. For example, the French writer Francois Rabelais published his controversial first book under Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of his name. The most entertaining anagrams are the ones where the rearranged letters make some sort of comment on the original. "Dormitory" turns into the anagram "dirty room," and "snooze alarms" can be rearranged into "Alas! No more Zs."

People who are good at seeing anagrams are often terrific Scrabble players, because they can look at a tray of seven letters and see new words that those letters can make.

I just came across a site where a programmer made a mock instant messaging app. You exchange comments with Sternest Meanings, who turns everything you say into an anagram.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Paws in Jobland is an interactive website that helps elementary school students explore different jobs. It has information about over a hundred jobs. In Jobland, they're grouped by location. For instance, a building site has an archtitect, a bricklayer, a drafter, an electrician, and more. Jobfinder helps students find jobs to look at by asking them a series of questions ("Do you like math?" "Do you like acting?"). You'll never guess how the jobs are arranged in the ABC Search section of the site.

You can run it with or without sound. Without sound, there's more reading, of course.

(Adults will notice that the voices in Jobland have a Canadian accent. The program was originally developed in Denmark, then adapted for England, then adapted for North America—and the North Americans were Canadian. The parent site is by XAP, a company that offers licensed career materials for students, educators, and adults. XAP does business in the US and Canada.)

MapStats for Kids (from FedStats, the statistics site with data from lots of federal agencies). Games show you how to represent data (like number of farms or average income) on maps. They can help you practice finding states on the map, and they're also good practice at working with numbers.

National Geographic Atlas Puzzles. Choose a map, then see it turned into jigsaw pieces and put it back together.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Freerice.com is a game site that does good. When you play and get right answers, advertisers give to the United Nations World Food Programme (the world's largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger). You get the fun of doing well at the game, and people who need food get food.

The game is simple: you're asked a question and given four possible answers. If you guess the right one, you earn 10 grains of rice. If you guess wrong, you don't. Either way, you keep going.

The game is always challenging (but not too hard), because if you get a lot of questions right, it gives you harder questions, and if you get a lot of questions wrong, it gives you easier questions. So you always end up being at a level where you get some questions right and some questions wrong. It makes you want to try one more . . . and one more . . . and one more.

You can set up an account to keep track of how much rice you've won—and to challenge your friends!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Khan Academy is a free site that has lots of great tools for helping people learn. There are thousands (yes,thousands!) of short videos on math (first grade through calculus), physics, biology, chemistry, history, business, and other topic.

Each video is about 10 minutes—long enough to explain one concept, but not so long that it goes past what you're working on to confuse you with the next topic. The videos have lots of diagrams and graphics to help you understand.

There are lots of practice exercises for math. You find out immediately whether your answer was correct. If you're not sure what's going on, you can see the problem solved, step by step.
You can set up a free account to keep track of your progress. You'll earn badges to show what you've mastered.

Teenagers: check out the SAT Math Prep. Mr. Khan works through all the math problems in The Official SAT Study Guide, writing on his computer "blackboard" as he talks. He recommends that you try to take a practice test on your own, score it, and THEN watch him solve the problems you had trouble with.

The Occupational Outlook Handbook has few pages a out each of hundreds of jobs. For example, the section on Registered Nurses has sections on what nurses do, their work environment, the education needed, the pay, and what the outlook for the profession is. Finally, you get a list of links for more information—professional associations, such as the American Nurses Association.

Career Bridge has lots of career information, focused on Washington State.

If you don't know where to start, take the career quiz: you check off the things you like to do and some words about what you're like, and then you get scored on different types of jobs (for example, law and law enforcement or architecture and construction).

You can search for education programs using keywords about the career you're interested in. In just a couple of clicks, you can find out what schools offer programs, how much they cost, how long they take, and more. You can even find out how the programs graduates do: do they get jobs? how much money do they get?

In the Job Trends section, you can find out about earnings for different occupations and whether experts expect there to be a lot of openings in the next several years.

This page lists job programs for youth (depending on the program, middle school to age 25).